Serena Davies reviews the final ever episode of Danish political drama
Borgen

At the start of each episode of Borgen, the Danish political drama that ended last night on BBC Four, is an astute aphorism. Before the finale came Abraham Lincoln’s words, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

That thought, in many ways, has been the leitmotif of the whole trilogy: three neat, perfectly paced series that took their heroine, Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), from hungry, principled MP in the Danish parliament via the role of Prime Minister to wise stateswoman. In the process she lost her marriage, she nearly lost her daughter, and, at several tender moments in the final series it looked as though she might lose her life, to breast cancer.

But it was how she handled power despite these travails that makes this a near-perfect drama, and it is creator Adam Price’s achievement to have made the political strand the most fascinating of Borgen’s narrative threads.

On the day of the general election, we saw her heading to the hospital, wrongly fearing that her cancer had returned. “I strive all my life to do something that has meaning, to make sense of it, to make things important and valuable and meaningful,” she said to her English boyfriend, in immaculate if staccato English. “But in the end it’s just meaningless, it’s just a big hole - it’s tearing me apart.” Then Knudsen’s malleable face wrenchingly crumpled in on itself, her eyes reduced to tiny, tearful dots.

But this was all the pity we saw Birgitte ask for - and the only time we have seen her break down so completely in any of the three series. After she learnt that the cancer scare was a false alarm Birgitte went on to sail through the election.

Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen)

In the evening, she discovered that her newly formed party, the centrist New Democrats, had won 13 seats and were thus being courted by both left and right in the parties’ efforts to form a new coalition government. At one point, in a frantic round of post-election wheeler-dealing, Birgitte was even offered the Prime Minister-ship again and I feared that, at the last minute, Borgen would slip into the fanciful. But she turned the opportunity down because she didn’t think a party with only 13 MPs had the people’s mandate to lead the country. She plumped for Foreign Minister instead.

Is Birgitte implausibly ethical? Who wouldn’t have grabbed the premiership? Yet Adam Price and his writers, remarkably, have persuaded us to believe in the noble politician. They make Birgitte’s endeavour to put the greater good beyond her own needs plausible precisely because she makes some wrong choices in the process and sometimes ends up hurting the people she loves.

This is whyBorgenis better than the rather more abstract ethics of altruistic politicking in that great American series about power in a democracy, The West Wing. This is also why the most moving moment in the final episode of Borgen wasn’t the news that Birgitte didn’t have cancer anymore but the moment when she looked up at the Danish parliament, and called it her “second home”.

In its picture of domestic life the programme has also, quietly, been exploring a modern truth: that single working mothers can be dominant figures in their chosen careers, without needing help from a man. Centre stage in series three alongside the divorced Birgitte has been Katrine Fønsmark, working out how to juggle her devotion to her toddler with her high-powered job as Birgitte's head of press. Never did the actress playing her,Birgitte Hjort Sørenson, for her all her palpable sadness at her son being without a full-time father, let us think this was a quandary she wouldn’t solve.

Indeed it was the male lead of the series, Torben Friis (Søren Malling), Head of News at state broadcaster TV1, who came a cropper in the game of work / life balance that Borgen has analysed so peerlessly. How could he do anything else when he had to work so hard that he needed to sleep in the office, even before his wife kicked him out of his house for having a fling with a colleague. His clumsy attempt in the penultimate episode to hug his son, when allowed a couple of hours with his two children, was tragic.

Every series of Borgenhas built up from lighter-hearted episodes with self-contained stories about stuff as seemingly mundane as pig farming to become gripping races to the finish that focus on destroyed love, a child suffering from mental illness, and (always) what it means to run a country, philosophically, morally and actually. Even if the British don’t, the Danes seem to think this last challenge can bring out the best in people, which is why something so finely produced as Borgen has been, at times, inspirational.